A New Class of Cellular Automata

In this paper we present a new class of one-dimensional cellular automata which does not have the design complexity of two dimensional cellular automata but achieves higher fault coverage than the two most commonly used maximal length linear finite state machines: linear hybrid cellular automata and linear feedback shift registers. This class of cellular automata is based on a five-cell neighbourhood, giving it a much richer transition structure, but still keeping the interconnection complexity very low. A recurrence relation is given to enable the efficient calculation of the characteristic polynomial. The effectiveness of the new cellular automata is investigated by using them as generators for built-in self-test of the ISCAS 85 and ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits. While the resulting fault coverage is never worse than using the traditional linear feedback shift register as the generator, in about half of the circuits the fault coverage is significantly improved, in some cases by more than 20%.